I think that if Christians actually met Jesus, their brains would be blown.
“Lord, I’ve believed in the trinity my whol…”
“Yeah, yeah, but did you believe that your neighbor was worthy of your help?”
So much of what he said was not about dogmas you should believe, but about things you should do.
All this nitpicking over who is and who isn’t Christian is going way overboard. Next thing you’ll be telling me is Jews aren’t Christians even though Jesus H. Christ his self was Jewish.
Was that before he went blond and had “Nordic” facial work done?
I prefer the Teenage Hipster Jesus with the barely-there beard from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew
I think it’s relatively well known that Keira Knightley played one of Princess Amidala’s (Natalie Portman) handmaidens in The Phantom Menace. But I was today years old when I learned that Sofia Coppola also played one of the handmaidens.
Not really, though. “Christian” covers so much ground (there are approximately a billion versions of what it means) that the term is all but meaningless, or at least simply cannot be defined.
As I’ve mentioned before, through a bizarre set of circumstances I once found myself in charge of the Education Committee at a Catholic community in Salt Lake City. I found myself seeking and booking speakers on matters theological.
I was very surprised to learn that a lot of people in the Catholic community didn’t consider members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the LDS; Mormons) to be “Christian”. This came as a surprise to me. I’d shared an office with an LDS guy in a city back East, and been his Best Man when he got married (not in a temple – there weren’t any nearby) and been to LDS church events. Nobody in the Catholic Community there had said anything about LDS not being Christian – but I guess it wasn’t a “live” issue there.
It seemed weird to me – the Mormons use the King James Bible, like most Protestant congregations do. They share a large number of beliefs with Protestants and Catholics (including the Trinity). If you drew a taxonomic tree of religions they’d definitely sprout from the Christian branch. Why shouldn’t you classify them as “Christian”?
But they also hold the Book of Mormon as a sacred text, have a whole other body of beliefs that other Christian faiths don’t, and their interpretations of many of the items they nominally hold in common with other Christian faiths are somewhat different, so that is apparently why the Catholics in SLC grouped the Mormons in a separate category from the Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox.
Makes me wonder what they thought about Christian Scientists, Shakers, and other such communities. But that never came up.
Taxonomically LDS is Christian, but LDS has a different view of the nature of God and his relationship to Jesus than that commonly held by other denominations. Something that would have to be explained by an LDS member, not me.
The LDS thing is an old problem with a largely political basis because of the way the church grew and developed, mainly setting themselves apart from communities that were essentially entirely Christian. Their unique definition of Christianity was just a simple way for others to classify them as outsiders. After moving to the Salt Lake region they became more isolated and of course a bigger target, eventually with the feds going after them. The concept of them being less Christian than other groups persisted since those times. It’s not altogether different the way some Protestants view Catholics, not to mention the rift between the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox Church. If not for the common experience of persecution Jewish sects probably wouldn’t get along as well as they barely do. Hasidim have concepts that differ from the majority of Jews, some Orthodox Jews say they don’t believe Conservative or Reform Jews are Jewish enough, and some Reform Jews may as well be (and are) Unitarians. Even in my religion, Last Thursdayism, the heretical practices of Last Wednesdayists are reviled. I can’t imagine a religion of any size avoiding such internecine conflicts.
Which is why more than one commentator has described Communism as a religion disguised as a secular philosophy.
Isn’t it also a question of Jesus’ 2nd coming going to happen versus it did happen in the New World?
This gets to the heart of the discussion here.
From an outsider perspective, it’s easy to see that every member of a faith picks and chooses beliefs, practices, and outcomes in an individual way. No two concepts of heaven ever seem to match in full description.
Yet sufficient overlap of generalities exist so that it is nearly impossible not to ascribe certain behaviors and judgements as “Christian” or “Muslim” or “Jewish” in the same way that “German” or “Yankee” or “extrovert” are used as stereotypes.
And even though “Communism” is practiced differently in every country that advocates for it (and presumably thought of individually, as “democracy” is), it’s clear that beyond the economic rationale proclaimed, the leaders in a communist country control the masses by using communism as a state religion, with icons, holy texts, and revered leaders leading back to a revealed creation. Subjugating all competing religions is necessary to ensure totalitarian control.
Most totalitarian regimes of all economic bases also use a form of this, although the formal structure may not be as obvious as with “Communism.” “Fascism” certainly progressed to this end by WWII.
Constructing taxonomies of religion is always a hot topic in theological circles, just as constructing taxonomies of authoritarian rule is in social science circles. We had a less formal thread here asking if Ron DeSantis was an actual Fascist. Responses were mixed.
Slapping quick and easy labels on people and groups is almost always a mistake. At the same time, some people and groups reach out and figuratively slap you in the face with their labels. Who has time to sort through every individual and group behavior to get to the idiosyncratic bases of their actions? When a raging beast is roaring at you, assume the worst and get out of the way.
Bats emit sounds to navigate by echolocation. Those sounds are very loud, even if we do not hear them because their frequency is outside our hearing range, but bats do, and the sound they emit is so loud that they would become deaf from their own shouting if they did not do something to counteract that. The solution? They close their ears shut when they emit the sounds, and open them again to listen to the reflected sound. How do they do it? By opening their mouths very wide when emiting the sounds, closing them again when listening. You can try that out yourself: when you open your mouth as wide as you can you hear less. You don’t hear well while you yawn. Bats take this anatomically to the extreme: they literally close their ears shut.
At least most species do that, I ignore whether all do. Bats are the second largest order of mammals, just after rodents, and there have a complicated evolutionary history of sub-orders, including flying foxes and the like, some of which do not echolocate, so there may be exceptions.
That was intriguing, and I don’t doubt that you are correct, but here’s a scenario to consider.
In our last house, our neighbor had bats in his eaves. I mean, lots of bats - it was a long time ago, but I’m pretty sure I counted them emerging one evening, and there were around 150 of them.
So, obvious question. What effect does 149 other shouting bats have on a listening bat’s open ears?
j
ETA - I had a lot of difficulty explaining about the bats to our neighbor - because he was pretty deaf. Just sayin’.
I guess it is not the same to shout from less than an inch away or from one yard away. Bats mouths and ears are really close, bats tend to be small. Minute, even.
And I guess the effect is cumulative: bats are close to each other when they leave their resting place, but swarm in different directions afterwards. But their mouth and ears stay close the whole time.
I am quoting by heart, sorry I forgot the quote.
ETA:
because he was pretty deaf. Just sayin’.
WHOT? Sorry, I was just yawning. 
ETA 2: Google, of course: How do bats echolocate and how are they adapted to this activity? | Scientific American>
For bats to listen to the echoes of their original emissions and not be temporarily deafened by the intensity of their own calls, the middle ear muscle (called the stapedius) contracts to separate the three bones there–the malleus, incus and stapes, or hammer, anvil and stirrup–and reduce the hearing sensitivity. This contraction occurs about 6 ms before the larynx muscles (called the crycothyroid) begin to contract. The middle ear muscle relaxes 2 to 8 ms later. At this point, the ear is ready to receive the echo of an insect one meter away, which takes only 6 ms.
Just a guess here but maybe when bats “flock” they can rely on other bats’ echoes to provide an ambient sonar background?
I don’t think that would really work, you need to know when the signal was emited and when the reflexion reaches you to extract the most information, but you (the bat, actually) does not know when the other bat shouts. Although the general noise may be enough to avoid big obstacles.
Actually, I hadn’t even considered the effect on echolocation when everyone in a “flock” is shouting at once. Is every bat shout extremely brief, so that they don’t (or tend not to) overlap?
j
TIL that “flock” is an acceptable term for a group of bats. Along with Camp, Cloud and Colony.
j
Yes, and each has a slightly different pitch, which they can vary. They change the frequency of their calls depending on whether they are navigating or chasing, and during the chase they change the frequency again the closer they home in on the target.
In general, echolocation calls are characterized by their frequency; their intensity in decibels (dB); and their duration in milliseconds (ms).
Milliseconds are what scientists call really brief.